I work in a shop where various developers work on Linux, OS X and Windows (useful for dogfooding - we support deploying to multiple platforms), and, there, Docker Compose has ironically turned out to be our chief source of cross-platform headaches, due to annoying differences in how it works on each host platform. Particularly with the networking subsystem.
I've seen the product they are selling, I've watched a docker command build me a multi-part infrastructure, automatically source databases and assets from afar, and do it all quickly. But then it failed the second time I tried it. I've not found it to be a reliable tool at all.
Which is the whole point of it. If it's not, it's just a bad abstraction. Docker-compose itself becomes the only variable
Since moving to Docker, we now have more cross-platform problems than we used to.
We continue to use it anyway, because there are some other benefits that we feel outweigh shortcomings like these. But still, it's annoying.
Local development also sucks. The docker engine is essentially unusable on my colleagues Mac, consuming 100%+ of all available cpu while sitting idle. On my Linux box, either docker breaks my networking, or IT firewall rules break dockers networking. It’s even worse with wfh, because our vpn is incomparable with docker. Local dev just happens in an anaconda env instead. So what’s the point?
VMs have none of these problems. Docker is the leakiest abstraction I’ve yet to come across.
- How would EC2s compare to Fargate ? I encountered situations where, running the numbers, I much preferred having my own set-up with images ready to deploy + adapting my EC2 instances to the task, instead of dealing with Fargate's convoluted restrictions and definitions
- Has your colleague tried to increase the disk size given to Docker? I have seen on a few macbooks that this made a world of difference for CPU usage, and I thought I'd pass on the information if it hasn't already be tried yet